As time went on, any sort of a story about Eastern Honduras caught my attention.  I started to stray from my interest in the lost city, and built up an interest in the actual geography of the land, and how so much of Eastern Honduras was simply unexplored.  Books like Paddle to the Amazon and The Savage Shore helped me peer into a place that was almost impossible to know, because it has been, for most of time, off the map.  The question became – what might exist in Eastern Honduras that no one knows about? 

In another phase of my youth, it was the people of Eastern Honduras that captivated me – tribes who traveled in dugouts, Garifuna who fish the Caribbean coasts, and the stories of eccentric foreigners who remade their lives at the end of the world from driftwood.

All of my sustained interest in this place, though, started with a frustration about my education in Minnesota.  It's own history as a state, both before and after statehood, is one worth telling. We grew up with the names of our lakes and our street names and our towns having exotic native names.  And we grew up next to fields of corn, and nearby, old homesteads, and along the great river.  But for all the countless qualities of Minnesotans, an understanding of our own state's history is not one of them.  I learned better with context.  I needed to see things to understand them.

History class was never about Minnesota – we were taught American history primarily through the eyes of New England's great events.  And while these great events surely are the climax of America's early history, I now believe we would have been better served to have seen American history more through the lens of the history that surrounded us.